java.util.Date get milliseconds

Question

I have done the following:

String standardRange = "00:01:01";
SimpleDateFormat rangeFormatter = new SimpleDateFormat("hh:mm:ss");
Date range = rangeFormatter.parse(standardRange);

Now:

range.getTime();

.. I get the output of -3539000 and not 61,000

I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong; when debugging, cdate exists, the attribute contains a fraction, which contains the value 61,000, which is what I want.

Answer 1

The reason you're seeing this is that the date you're creating is actually in the past of the date epoch, not 1m1s after it:

String standartRange = "00:01:01";
SimpleDateFormat rangeFormatter = new SimpleDateFormat("hh:mm:ss");
Date range = rangeFormatter.parse(standartRange);

System.out.println(new Date(0L));
System.out.println(new Date(0L).getTime());
System.out.println(range);
System.out.println(range.getTime());

---

and its output;

Thu Jan 01 01:00:00 GMT 1970
0
Thu Jan 01 00:01:01 GMT 1970
-3539000

The epoch date is incorrect here - it should be 00:00:00, but due to a historical bug where BST/GMT changed dates and timezone cant keep track. It seems that Sun/Oracle consider this a historical "inaccuracy".

Check out the bug report - its describes the problem more fully.

From your language (German) this may not be directly due to this BST issue, but its almost certainly related.